Flowers
I’m pushing my boundaries, leaving my comfort zone, by going soft and dreamy for this week’s post. Reducing clarity to create softness is a photographic technique I seldom (almost never) use. I’m one who is always going for more sharpness instead.
It’s a technique, though, that I should probably use more often. Reducing clarity to make an image soft and dreamy is especially effective with some flower images.
Reducing clarity and using a mask to sharpen part of the image is great for changing depth of field, too.
Foggy conditions naturally reduce clarity without any additional processing.
Trees
As I played around with reducing clarity, I discovered that I really love what this technique did to a few of my tree images.
I was able to make some of my tree images soft and dreamy, giving them a painterly effect.
The following image was always one of my favorites, but I could never get it as sharp as I needed to. It was always a little too busy, too. But reducing clarity gives it the look of an impressionist painting. I love it!
Waterfalls
One place where reducing clarity is especially impressive is in waterfall images.
It makes the water silkier and fuller. You can see this effect in the following 2 images.
Perhaps you don’t want the whole image soft, though. In the following photo, I used a mask to soften the water but left the rest sharp.
If you want to obscure a busy background by making the image soft and dreamy but also want to preserve some detail in the foreground, you can use a few different tricks to make that happen. I used a couple of techniques in the following series.
Waves
Waves are also fun to make soft and dreamy. Here’s another series.
By reducing clarity, texture, and dehaze, I transformed this ocean sunset into an almost abstract watercolor.
Landscapes
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in Monochromes, I usually try to stay realistic with my photos. But this winter is all about getting out of my comfort zone, both physically and creatively. And actually, reducing clarity works particularly well with the Orcas Island landscape.
Reducing clarity and going monochrome turned this flat, boring photo taken in terrible midday light into an image I can be proud of.
Thank you to Bren of Brashley Photography for this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, Bringing Softness. You’ve helped me to stretch and learn a new technique!